A Deeper Preview of Dr. Katharine Frase’s Upcoming SC16 Keynote

November 10, 2016

Nov. 10 — Watson, IBM’s powerful and multi-faceted cognitive computing system which was once best known for beating humans at the game show Jeopardy, has grown into a powerhouse of a problem-solving tool for doctors, scientists and business leaders. Thought leaders in the high performance computing arena will gather to hear insights about Watson’s evolving applications as well as what kind of computing comes next at the upcoming SC16 conference [the premier international conferenceshowcasing high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis] keynote by Dr. Katharine Frase in Salt Lake City, Utah on November 15, 2006.

“The capabilities of cognitive computing are game-changing, and I don’t mean a TV game show,” said Frase, who recently led strategy and business development for IBM’s Watson Education unit. Her keynote titled “Cognitive Computing: How can we accelerate human decision making, creativity and innovation using techniques from Watson and beyond?” will cross many disciplines and cover topics that are very relatable to the average consumer.

According to Frase, cognitive computing is about a new relationship between systems and humans, one in which higher-level thinking, research and decision making results from systems that learn, and systems that can give advice. She further added that cognitive computing has crossed the threshold of a new era; one in which we get to not just revel in the facts of processing power and increased computing capacity and capability, but also unleash that transformational power on some of the most complex and multidimensional problems faced by humanity.

“Watson and cognitive computing in general can serve significantly in every single arena in which we grapple with multi-layered, data-intensive problems: how to best treat cancers; how to adapt to conditions brought about by climate change; how to quickly and effectively harness new kinds of sustainable energy; how to untangle intractable governmental or community development challenges,” Frase stated. “Now more than ever, visionary thinking will drive an endless and transformative array of applications for Watson and cognitive computing in general, along with whatever comes next.”

She elaborated that Watson is no single tool, but rather a set of multilayered, interconnected and deep computational systems that work together and act very much like a human brain. Instead of being programmed by humans to generate specific kinds of answers in predictable conditions, Watson instead “learns” everything there is to know about a topic or a specific field by digesting input data, and using what it knows to make predictions in addition to providing reasoning behind each prediction. A practitioner can then study that data to make the ultimate best decision.

Watson can incorporate almost any kind of information, from studies and data sets to news reports, in all kinds of formats including “natural language.” Watson not only suggests solutions to the problems posed to it, but also includes measurements of the evidence behind a given solution and predictions about how likely the solution is to be successful based on what it has been taught about the problem.

According to Frase, cognitive computing is uniquely helpful for complex and multidimensional problems with many variables and massive amounts of relevant information. For example, oncologists need to read many hours a week if they hope to stay current with all cancer research and studies being published each day, week and month, but Watson is a voracious reader and can process 500 gigabytes—the equivalent of a million books per second—into its decision-making calculus.

“Perhaps the most exciting thing about Watson is its ability to make hypotheses without the effect of any of the unconscious burdens of human bias that we know can creep into extremely complex decisions, like cancer treatment,” she said. “We are learning more every day about cancers and their unique biomarkers and ways to target treatment, but being able to incorporate those new discoveries quickly into the actual treatment scenarios is beyond exciting for everyone involved, from patients, to doctors, to researchers, not to mention those of us who have helped to develop and deploy these cognitive computing frameworks,” Frase said.

Seeking to reign in the tediousness of manual software testing, Pfizer HPC Engineer Shahzeb Siddiqui is developing an open source software tool called buildtest, aimed at automating software stack testing by providing the community with a central repository of tests for common HPC apps and the ability to automate execution of testing. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

In just a few months time, Senegal will be operating the second largest HPC system in sub-Saharan Africa. The Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation Mary Teuw Niane made the announcement on Monday (Jan. 14 Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

If it's Nvidia GPUs you're after to power your AI/HPC/visualization workload, Google Cloud has them, now claiming "broadest GPU availability." Each of the three big public cloud vendors has by turn touted the latest and Read more…

Previous:

STAC (Securities Technology Analysis Center) recently released an ‘exploratory’ benchmark for machine learning which it hopes will evolve into a firm benchmark or suite of benchmarking tools to compare the performanc Read more…

By James Reinders

Quantum computing has lived so long in the future it’s taken on a futuristic life of its own, with a Gartner-style hype cycle that includes triggers of innovation, inflated expectations and – though a useful quantum system is still years away – anticipatory troughs of disillusionment. Read more…

By John Russell

Anyone who has checked a forecast to decide whether or not to pack an umbrella knows that weather prediction can be a mercurial endeavor. It is a Herculean task: the constant modeling of incredibly complex systems to a high degree of accuracy at a local level within very short spans of time. Read more…

By John Russell

Cray revealed today the details of its next-gen supercomputing architecture, Shasta, selected to be the next flagship system at NERSC. We've known of the code-name "Shasta" since the Argonne slice of the CORAL project was announced in 2015 and although the details of that plan have changed considerably, Cray didn't slow down its timeline for Shasta. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

It’s been a good two weeks, AMD’s Gary Silcott and Andy Parma told me on the last day of SC18 in Dallas at the restaurant where we met to discuss their show news and recent successes. Heck, it’s been a good year. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

For nearly two hours on Monday at SC18, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, presented his expansive view of the future of HPC (and computing in general) as only he can do. Animated. Backstopped by a stream of data charts, product photos, and even a beautiful image of supernovae... Read more…

By John Russell

Riding healthy U.S. and global economies, strong demand for AI-capable hardware and other tailwind trends, the high performance computing server market jumped 28 percent in the second quarter 2018 to $3.7 billion, up from $2.9 billion for the same period last year, according to industry analyst firm Hyperion Research. Read more…

By John Russell

As part of the run-up to SC18, taking place in Dallas next week (Nov. 11-16), Intel is doling out info on its next-gen Cascade Lake family of Xeon processors, specifically the “Advanced Processor” version (Cascade Lake-AP), architected for high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and infrastructure-as-a-service workloads. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

Networking equipment powerhouse Mellanox could be an acquisition target by Microsoft, according to a published report in an Israeli financial publication. Microsoft has reportedly gone so far as to engage Goldman Sachs to handle negotiations with Mellanox. Read more…